Meeting notice: The 01.10.02 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal 
East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. 
and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll 
probably know where we are.  More details below.

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Suggested topic:  Does technological change bear any responsibility for 
enabling incidents such as 911?  

Unlike the terrorism of the last century, and to some degree that of the 
70's, which claimed to be about stimulating new social relationships, 
terrorists today, from the Palestinians to Al-Quida to Timothy McVeigh, are 
almost always interested in resurrecting some past order or condition. This 
nostalgia is not always, as with the Unabomber, explicitly anti-
technological; nonetheless, few of the complaints that drive the phenomenon 
would be possible without, and are not aggravated by, technological change.   

In this sense terrorism is one kind of friction generated by change. Given 
that metaphor we might ask if it is static or dynamic friction, sticky 
friction or rolling friction?  If the former, it should disappear; if the 
latter, it might be with us forever.  Much nostalgia is of course entirely 
relative -- every generation has the same thoughts about the days of its 
youth, when issues were clear and the sounds and colors of life bright and 
memorable.  But not all nostalgia results in terrorism.  That which does is 
usually based on one or another myth of ethnic purity.  In fact is unclear 
to me that terrorism, based as it is on the denial of empathy to groups, 
can exist at all without standing on an ethnic purity story. 

However, if you believe, as we do, that the cost of communications and 
transportation for a given basket of inputs is going to fall arbitrarily 
close to zero over the next generation or two, then it is not at all clear 
that the circumstances will exist that will allow ethnic purity to sustain 
itself even as a myth.   Evidence of the point can be found in contemporary 
large American cities, which have grown dramatically more hostile to 
ethnically exclusive cultures over the last 25-50 years.  (Even South 
Boston is a shadow of what it used to be.)  The level and integration of 
ethnic variety in these cities are so high that supremacist arguments have 
no purchase; they connect to nothing; they are absurd on their face. 

This suggests that terrorism is sticky friction, and that once the 
technological enterprise has passed certain mileposts -- once a generation 
has grown up in a world in which it costs almost nothing to go anywhere 
(and we have been living in the world for a few years now) -- it will be 
history.



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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: 
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.
	
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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on 
the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, 
which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

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